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The situation is ridiculous but AFAIK the problem lies at the feet of publishers and how they handle/distribute rights on books.
This is how it works as I understand it (I might be wrong!). Stephen King signs up for them to publish the works, then they assign/sell the rights for certain regions to specific publishers (usually a smaller publishing house associated with the main one).
The Australian division/publisher gets money from the books sold in the region in return for distributing it. So the Australian division of penguin gets the rights from the main publishing arm and makes profit from Australian sales. The main publisher doesn't want Australian customers buying from the US via the Internet because the Australian division gets screwed.
They need to have some simple IP matching so the smaller divisions/publishers get their cut and ebooks are available globally.
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